George Jonas on animals as military assets

Asuspected Mossad agent is in Saudi custody this week, say media reports. The spy looks so much like a vulture that untrained observers have mistaken it for one, but the Zionists can’t fool the security experts of the oily Kingdom. They recognize a spy when they see one, and even when they don’t.

The Saudis won’t fall for the old vulture trick. They don’t judge an agent by its cover. A Global Positioning System (GPS) transmitter carried by the scavenger doesn’t make the spy-catchers jump to conclusions and neither does a tag identifying it as “R65.” What clinches the matter for Saudi intelligence is a ring attached to the bird’s leg that’s inscribed “Tel Aviv University.” In English, no less.

Apparently, that’s the unmistakable signature of a spy agency. That’s how agencies identify intelligence-gathering birds they send out on missions. CIA rings say “Harvard,” MI6 prefers “Cambridge,” and DGSE uses “Sorbonne.” The Mossad signs its vultures “Tel Aviv University.” When Riyadh’s aptly named counterintelligence people saw this ring on R65’s leg, they knew they were dealing with a bird of a different feather.

It wasn’t unexpected. After all, only a few weeks earlier, the Zionists sent sharks to bite Russian tourists in Egypt. The Governor of the Southern Sinai, Abed Al-Fardij, minced no words about it.

“We must not discount the possibility that Mossad threw the shark into the sea, in order to attack tourists,” the plain-spoken dignitary said at the time. “Mossad is trying to hurt Egyptian tourism in any way possible, and the shark is one way for it to realize its plan.”

So there you have it. If sharks are here, can vultures be far behind? This bit of logic is echoing throughout the Arab/Muslim world, from assorted Internet sites to Al Jazeera.

The Wall Street Journal has been rather sarcastic, commenting that, “When the only diagnosis Egyptians can offer for their various predicaments — ranging from sectarian terrorism to a recent spate of freak shark attacks at a Sinai beach resort — is that it’s all a Zionist plot, you know that the country is in very deep trouble.”

Yeah, sure. What else would you expect the Great Satan to say?

Little Satan is defending its vultures, too. The press quotes a bird ecologist for the Nature and Parks Authority, Ohad Hatzofe, commenting that Tel Aviv University’s birds participate in a long-term science project to follow the migration and altitude of vultures, and no buzzards are being used for nefarious purposes. “There is also an international treaty of nature-protection professionals that forbids doing things like this,” Hatzofe adds, as if this settled the matter either for spy agencies or conspiracy theorists.

Okay. Shark and vulture paranoia may sound ludicrous, but persistent rumours acquire a reality of their own. Dismissing an entire civilization as suffering from persecution mania wouldn’t be feasible even if it were true — and anyway, the truth is more complex. It’s true there’s nothing human beings won’t believe, but it’s also true there’s nothing human beings won’t try.

Even so, I don’t think the Mossad is training Egyptian sharks. Training sharks to bite is unnecessary, and training them to bite tourists is difficult, as swimmers don’t carry passports and sharks can’t read. However, training animals for military purposes is no conspiracy theory. People have been doing it since antiquity.

“Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war,” wrote Shakespeare in Julius Caesar. We’ve tried relentlessly to turn man’s best friend into man’s worst enemy ever since the Lydians fielded a battalion of fighting dogs in 628 BC. And where are the Lydians now, you may ask. Precisely. Even though an Irish Wolfhound could pull a mounted Norman off his horse, in the end the equine warriors carried the day.

Fighting dogs turned out to be duds, although canines were good as trackers and great as mascots. Fighting elephants, including Hannibal’s famous pachyderms, were double duds. They often got spooked in battle and trampled down their own troops, and left much to be desired as regimental pets. They remained a bit of a military status symbol, though, with Lin Wang, the Kuomintang elephant from the Sino-Japanese war, retreating to Taiwan and surviving until 2003.

One unlimited success was the horse. Some historians describe the Battle of Waterloo in terms of a grudge match between Copenhagen and Marengo, the first being the Duke of Wellington’s mount, and the second, Napoleon’s. Cats worked well at vermin control for the Royal Navy, as did turkeys for General Franco’s pilots delivering fragile supplies during the Spanish Civil War. When released from slow-flying airplanes, they landed softly and were a good food source after a successful drop. Less ideal were pigs, dolphins, bats and other land and marine mammals Americans tried training for various combat missions during and after the Second World War. Carrier pigeons worked out well, with 32 of them receiving military decorations.

All in all, animal warriors have been a disappointment. I doubt spy agencies are expanding into sharks and vultures because they aren’t mean and martial enough. When it comes to warfare, humans make the best animals.